Recording - February 2010 - 43

Continued from page 41 he would play I would go out there and watch him. I would watch where his hands were on the keys. And so, then, when he would leave, I’d go out there and I’d mimic where he was and I’d play a chord. I didn’t know what the chord was at the time, but I’d play it and go, “Hey, cool.” Then I’d go over here and go, “Hey, cool. Wow. Cool. Ooh, that’s bad.” And I just started singing to that stuff and making up my own songs as a young kid. I used to go back in my room and draw up album covers and put all these songs on them—like I had my own album. You know, I had two pages and I’d staple… I don’t know if anybody… You guys know what an album is, right? Look at the average age of the audience! But you know how it was such a cool thing to look at an album. So I would draw all these elaborate covers, then on the back I would have all the credits, “written by me,” “produced by me.” I had a pretty crazy imagination. I would go sit down at the piano in the garage and I’d get a thing of iced tea. I’d sit the iced tea down, then I’d put my album cover up on the music stand and I’d play all the songs on my album. [laughter] Is it easier for you to write it or sing it? Probably to sing it. I mean, you guys know when you write, you’re never happy with it. It’s never done. You have to at some point let the song go. It took me a lot of years to realize that you have to just write the song. What I do, too, is, if I get stuck on a song and I can’t find the second verse—which happens to a lot of people I know—I just put it away and start another song and come back to it later with fresh ears and see if something hits me. But I never try to force myself into a corner where I have to rhyme a word, because then it’s like you’re doing math. You’re trying to make the song look really neat and you want it all to be perfect, when you’re not really writing the song that you’re trying to write. You know what I mean by that? You’re not really writin’ that song; you’ve got to get back in that headspace where it’s your subconscious kind of controlling you. How do you balance the perfectionism you have to deliver in Nashville with that moment of writing where you need to let go of the perfectionism and get back to just feeling it? Do you just feel it? Well, it’s not really a plan. I just keep writing songs. A lot of times you get in your head that this is the song, this is the one that God sent down to me, and this is gonna be the one. I’ll write a thousand bad ones to get one great one. Even you? Yeah, you have to. It’s like throwin’ a baseball. You’ve got to be ready to go in and pitch when they call you in to pitch. You’ve got to have your arm ready; you’ve got to have all those tricks. Sometimes those tricks will get you a song, which is great. But sometimes when you get that lightening in a bottle inspiration that comes—and you don’t know where it came from—you’ve got all these tricks to guide you now through that song that you can rely on when you get to those stuck places. You don’t even have to think about it, that “this is a trick that I have to pull it out of my bag.” It’s just there? You instinctively know, and it’s also really important, to me, anyway, to keep learning other formats and genres. And it’s all about the “The very thing I was doing wrong has become my thing.” —Jeffrey Steele words to me, and, obviously, I’m in a lot of different formats now with my music—but in the Country world, I mean, that story is the king. And I knew that growing up some of my musical influences were pretty scattered all over the place, but those musical influences really made me feel what was inside of me. Like sometimes most guys will go to Nashville and they’re gonna write what everybody else is writing. They want to get into that system. And I did it for a while, but at some point I got back to just music that really made me feel something, that made a word come out. And I started writing more like that. I started chasing those things and forgetting about what everybody else was doing. Back in the mid-’90s in Nashville a lot of female artists were really coming to the forefront, like Shania Twain and Faith Hill, and I was writing all these songs that were really southern rockinfluenced that didn’t make any sense at the time. And every time I’d turn one in, they’d go, “Man, Jeff, dude. You can’t get this stuff cut. No one’s gonna cut this.” I was having this conversation with Danny Wells last night. He’s here somewhere. He’s written some songs with Jeff. Some that have been very successful. And I said, “Jeffrey makes it look so easy,” and he goes, “No, you gotta know, man. After Boy Howdy, the boy worked his ass off on his craft.” I was shocked by that, frankly, because you’ve always made it look so easy, so when we ask you guys [in the audience] to work harder, reach higher… Well, you know, when I was in that band and had a record deal and had a bunch of buses and did the deal—eight or 10 years on the road, whatever it was. Then when we lost our record deal, and when I came to Nashville, I was the bass player in that band. That’s who I was. I wrote all the hit songs the band had, but when I came to Nashville, I was just that bass player/singer from that band. That’s who I was, so when I got to town with a bunch of hits under my belt, nobody could care less, so I did what I knew how to do: I got a gig at a bar on a Monday night down on Broadway. And I remember people coming in and going, “That’s that guy from that band Boy Howdy. Man, he’s had some hard times.” [laughter] Lost his record deal; now he’s playin’ Monday nights in a bar. I was singing demos, which I had done out here in L.A. For years and years I was the demo king out here. But I went back to what I knew and started singing demos for some of the bigger songwriters at that time in the early ’90s. I just started doing that. And I came to a time when I lost my voice for a while. There was a chance that I could never sing again, and you know I love to sing and do my thing. I had to struggle with that; I had to struggle with maybe letting that go, and maybe having to have surgery, knowing that I couldn’t perform the way I once performed, so there were two years in there where I really had to… I was scared, not only because of the health of it, having to have surgery and all that stuff, which I didn’t do. I ended up finding a way around that. I retrained myself how to sing and I got better. In all that time all I could do was write, so I just kept writing and writing and writing. It was obnoxious how much I wrote. How many songs did you write a week then? 40, 50. Wow. And a lot of ’em sucked, I promise you. [laughter] But I tell you what—sometimes I’d write a line in a song that I thought was really cool, and the song wasn’t really that great. And then I went back and looked at that line and thought, ‘Man, that’s a pretty good title for a song; I should just write that,” you know. It’s like everything you write you’re writing your life; you’re getting your stuff out there, so all that stuff you’re writing, it’s not like, OK, somebody didn’t cut your song so throw it away, you’ve got to go get a new one now. All that stuff is valid. You’re writing your life. You can go back to that; it’s like your well. You don’t have to go, “OK, I can’t use that now because I already wrote that.” Uh-uh. And I know a lot of us get like that, because I’ve been known to get like that, like, “Now I’m rippin’ myself off.” [laughter] Well, at least you robbed the right bank! That’s your style—that becomes your style. Those quirks and things, all those things that you think suck about you, that’s probably your million dollars right there. See what I mean? Honest to God. Shut me up when you need to shut me up. You’re actually answering every question I’ve already written, so I’m just sittin’here thinking,“I’m gonna let him go.” When I was in high school, I had a guitar class, and Continued on page 45

Recording - February 2010

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